DATE: Wednesday, June 18, 1997              TAG: 9706190641

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E4   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY CHRISTOPHER LEE PHILIPS 

                                            LENGTH:   74 lines

LEARY'S BOOK ON DYING IS TESTAMENT TO HIS WORKS

ABOUT THIS time last year, the ubiquitous Timothy Leary made his final trip (my assumption) to meet his Maker (my assumption again). Stricken with prostate cancer in January 1995, the counterculture guru of groovy decided to make performance art out of dying. Seizing the much-hyped medium of the day, he made a strategic reemergence on the Internet and began to download his consciousness so that the rest of the world might share in his death experience. It was classic Leary. He would have made P.T. Barnum proud.

Leary's posthumous book ``Design for Dying'' (with apologies to Noel Coward), is a curious mix of Leary's previous writings paraphrased for the present; a further promulgation of ``Leary Theory''; and observations on digitizing one's soul, the meaning of life, preserving the brain through cryonics and challenging medical and societal taboos with regard to one's personal freedom where death and dying are concerned.

Leary acknowledges that he is not the first to hype the notion of dying with dignity, and he is perhaps not the first to suggest seeking immortality through direct brain-computer transfers and storing the embodiment of one's gray-matter on a single computer chip. But Timothy Leary is surely the only trained psychologist who could enunciate such matters without sounding like a bad science fiction writer.

Written during the last 18 months of his life, when Leary was staving off severe pain with opiates, ``Leary Biscuits'' and a host of other controlled substances, ``Design for Dying'' is an uneven book, ending abruptly, as one might expect, only to appear padded by the reminiscences of close friends and associates. But on its merits, ``Design for Dying'' serves as a testament to several Learyian tenants, including expanding one's consciousness, questioning authority and seeking solutions to one's own needs without accepting the limitations of social acceptance.

Timothy Leary was a rogue academic during the 1960s, when academia was the conscience of the nation. A psychologist with a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, Leary taught at Harvard, where he was involved with experiments in the use of LSD. Those experiments led to his dismissal from the university. Drug charges followed, along with his conversion to Hinduism, arrest, exile abroad and imprisonment during 1973-1976.

There was a time when Leary was taken seriously within mainstream academia. During the late '50s, when he studied psychotherapy at the Kaiser Psychological Research Foundation, Leary produced an influential study titled ``The Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality,'' which challenged traditional authoritarian outlooks on psychological health in favor of more collaborative therapist-patient diagnoses.

His troubles began in earnest and soared proportionately in relation to his study of drugs, especially psychedelic drugs, and his book recapitulates his position on drugs and drug culture. While there is nothing new in Leary's message on drugs, there are observations to consider here. One is that the mainstream news media have been ``extraordinarily careless'' in drug reportage.

It was surely Leary's psychological obsession with the study, definition and evolution of the self that led to his immersion in drug culture and subsequent narcissism as a pop icon of the '60s. Though the ``establishment'' may never forgive him his sins, history must surely lionize him as a man who was ``outside looking in,'' a free thinker of the higest order.

``Design for Dying'' was written with R.U. Sirius, himself a free-thinking cyber-culture author. Sirius' contributions to the book seem at times intrusive, but in the end he waxes eloquently on one of the most animated minds of the '60s. MEMO: Christopher Lee Philips, a graduate of Old Dominion University, is

a free-lance writer in Falls Church. ILLUSTRATION: Graphic

BOOK REVIEW

``Design for Dying''

Author: Timothy Leary With R.U. Sirius

Publisher: HarperSanFrancisco. 239 pp.

Price: $24

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